How to Evade the Email Tsunami

Does your company receive hundreds or even thousands of emails every day? How do you ensure that every correspondent gets a response?

The New York Times focused yesterday on the problem of too much email and how to handle it, highlighting a few possible solutions gleaned from both technology leaders of today and from the prolific writers of previous generations. Declaring “email bankruptcy” (simply deleting all your email) is one solution, but would you really do that to your customers and other contacts?

Thomas Edison, who received over 100,000 unsolicited letters had a different approach. He employed secretaries to help him respond to every letter. Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures doesn’t quite agree with this approach, but does recommend forwarding emails to others in your company who are better equipped to answer certain types of emails. But this method comes with it’s own set of problems. How do you know that an email that you forwarded actually was responded to? What if you want to keep track of that email conversation, even though someone else in your company is dealing with it?

Now imagine that your company has this problem and that your info@, sales@, and customerservice@ inboxes are overflowing. You probably don’t even have to imagine this problem. You probably face the issue every day. How do you ensure that every inquiry gets a personal response? How do you make sure that responses are sent out quickly so you don’t keep your customers and contacts waiting?

Email Center Pro ensures that inbound emails no longer receive either duplicate answers or, even worse, no answer at all. Instead of forwarding mail from computer to computer, person to person, you can now answer email in shared inboxes quickly and easily with a centralized email solution. Never again lose a customer because of employees playing “not it” with a shared mailbox.

Email Center Pro was developed to solve our own shared inbox problem here at Palo Alto Software. We used to forward mails around, never sure whether a response had been sent or what the response was. We developed Email Center Pro for internal use initially but soon realized that many of our small business customers had the same email pains that we did. As a result, we have now released Email Center Pro as a product to help other small and growing businesses manage their email better. Email Center Pro includes great productivity features such as tagging, templates, multiple mailbox management, email assignments, internal notes, threading, and much more.

We hope that you find Email Center Pro as useful in your business as it is for us here at Palo Alto Software. Sign up today for a free account and take it for a test drive.